Assorted Notes

WEDNESDAY, 22 FEBRUARY 2012

One of the few popular sayings I hold as a universal truth is that one should never give up. I’ve believed in this for many years, and I recite it to myself on such a regular basis that it could almost qualify as religious incantation. Everyone I respect who has anything to say about life confirms this: You do not give up. You should never, ever give up. If you give up, it’s over. You put posters on your walls that remind you of this. You buy T-shirts with wording that confirms this. You forward links to videos with this message, and you share stories on Facebook so that friends and family never forget. If necessary, you write it with a black marker on the soles of your sneakers: “Never give up.”

The giving up to which these sayings refer is the fatal type, the existential type. It refers to a decision to stop taking action; you’re done with everything, done with trying.

Yet, despite the vital conviction you keep so close to your heart, occasionally you do come to a point where you don’t have much of a choice. Difference, though, what you give up on is not life, and it doesn’t mean you will never try again.

Sometimes you have to give up on things that do not work anymore, or things that have never really worked. Sometimes people give up on a relationship, or a marriage. Sometimes, after trying for years to hang on at a company because heaven knows you needed the money, you give up. You quit. You wipe your hands of something you gave your best to make work.

And sometimes you let go of the steering wheel of projects you have driven over a thousand rocky roads. You let go of the wheel, you unbuckle your seatbelt, and you jump out of the car before it comes to a crashing halt at the base of a wall, or before it shoots off the edge of a cliff.

Because sometimes you have to give up to survive.

______________________

WEDNESDAY, 3 AUGUST 2011

There is not enough for everyone in South Africa – not enough nutritious food, not enough cash for everyone to have some money in the bank, not enough homes for everyone to sleep safely and warmly, not enough clothes for everyone to feel good about how they appear in public, not enough jobs for everyone to earn a decent income, not enough hospital beds for all the sick and injured, and not enough well-equipped classrooms for all the children to get a good education. A hundred years ago, there was not enough for the British and the Afrikaners, or the Boers. Fifty years ago there was not enough for the whites AND all of those who were not white. And today there is not enough for ALL the people who suffered under the previous dispensation.

So, if you made money during the previous era – regardless of race, and you managed to hold on to it, you’re in. So too if you’ve built up the right business and political connections over the last fifteen to twenty years and the cash is flowing uncontrollably into your bank accounts. You have clearly done the right things, and/or knew the right people – you, too, are in.

For the rest, white and poor in a squatter caravan park, black and poor in squatter camps or in hamlets somewhere in the countryside, and all other colours that are not white or black but still poor, there is simply NOT ENOUGH.

There will be talk. Bandages will be applied to broken bones. But at the end of the day, this reality remains: There is simply not enough for everyone. (Or is there?)

THURSDAY, 29 DECEMBER 2011

I get that there isn’t enough for everyone. But that’s not the only problem. Even if you manage a more just distribution of resources, a portion of the populace will end up squandering resources and opportunities, due to lack of training and education, or will, or talent, or a combination of these.

Then there’ll be some people who will be more industrious, more resourceful. These people will, within a generation or two, be at the pinnacle of society, as both rulers and prime beneficiaries of opportunities.

One or two generations later, the descendants of those who had performed less well will protest injustice, and will ready their protest banners in a call for a more just society, for a more equal distribution of resources.

Counter-argument: Do the lazy, talentless and unimaginative offspring of successful earlier generations deserve better education and opportunities than the hard-working, talented, and industrious offspring of less successful earlier generations?

______________________

THURSDAY, 3 NOVEMBER 2011

Stop fighting with every man and woman on the street.

Stop arguing with every person you encounter.

Stop making use of every opportunity you get to start a quarrel.

Stop being the dog that chases every cat whose smell the wind drives towards him.

Stop being the dog that barks up each and every tree, whether there’s a cat in it or not.

Fight the battle where you have a reasonable chance of success.

FRIDAY, 23 DECEMBER 2011

If you’re in a meaningful relationship … Or, let me make it more personal. I think my relationship with Natasja makes it easier for me to allow myself to be happy. The reason is that I know the happiness of the woman I love, and whose welfare I care about, depends to a significant extent on whether or not I am happy.

If you don’t allow yourself to be happy, the people closest to you will be affected by it. If you care for the people closest to you, if you sincerely hope that their daily existence will see a degree of happiness, you will permit yourself to be happy.

It is the unselfish thing to do.

______________________

WEDNESDAY, 19 OCTOBER 2011

This morning around five o’clock I woke up for about five seconds, had a thought about a handful of crayons, a child, and a picture, and the meaning that can be extracted from that on the limitation of language when it comes to religion and “absolute truth”, and then I fell asleep again.

The point was this: You give someone a palette with ten or fifteen colours of paint. Then you pull open the curtains on a beautiful, colourful scene – let’s say grassland in Africa after good rains, with more than a dozen species of animals standing, walking, or lying around. After the person has taken in the scene, you tell him to paint what he has seen. And he has to do it with the colours you have made available to him.

Perhaps this person is really talented, and his painting is rich in detail and full of colour.

Question is, is this image a 100% accurate representation of the actual scene – of the grass and the trees and the animals and the sky and the clouds and the birds and all the minute details that fill reality?

How can it be? He only had a dozen or so colours to work with! And then there’s his personality, even his state of mind when he painted the picture. To pick one example, was his omission of the ominous clouds on the horizon deliberate? How much detail did he leave out simply because he lacked the necessary talent?

Let’s now take the analogy further. The person who had painted the landscape is later seen as an authority figure in some religious tradition. Besides the landscape representation, he also produced hundreds of other paintings and sketches and pieces of text, all of which became increasingly precious items after his death. Eventually, these documents and art works were turned into prescriptions for how people should behave, and for how things ought to be described. Within a few generations, the landscape painting, for example, provided guidance to the community about how one ought to talk about animals as found on an African grassland after good rains.

Initially it would have been acceptable if someone had said: “This is clearly a giraffe, although a giraffe isn’t really orange – like the fruit, it’s more of a dark mustard colour.”

A few generations later this painting, like hundreds of other sketches and paintings and pieces of text produced by this authority figure, had been elevated to the status of sacred artefacts. At this time it would have been orthodox to refer to a giraffe as orange like the fruit, even that it had never been anything but orange. Why? The picture indicates it as such – clearly, to all who had eyes to see. “How can anyone deny it?” it would have been asked. “Even a child can see it. Indeed, you have to believe like a child.” To confirm this understanding, hundreds of volumes of material would have been written that explained the correct and only acceptable way the artefact should have been interpreted.

Let’s say in the course of a few centuries this religious community became the dominant group in society. By this time you could get in serious trouble with the authorities of the day if you even thought of a giraffe as anything other than Orange – Like the Fruit. Individuals who dared mumble something that sounded like “mustard” in reference to the giraffe could have been summoned before a court, thrown in a dungeon, tortured, and where it was suspected that such a person might have contaminated other innocent minds with the heretical mustard colour business, be sent to the stake.

“You are wrong,” people would say centuries later in more civilised times. “A giraffe is orange, a lion is brown, grass is bright green, the sky is blue, antelopes are brown, and their eyes are yellow. This is how it is. It must be so. It cannot be otherwise, because the Holy Painting says so.”

And anyone who wants to talk about an ancient palette with only ten or fifteen colours, and the original painting just being a sincere and honest attempt at producing a representation of a reality much too rich in colour, taste, sound and feeling for any human being with limited resources and capabilities to ever reproduce 100% accurately is simply too smart for their own good.

______________________